Edition:

Spin me right round

The vinyl LP has been pronounced dead over and over again - with the birth of cassettes, then CDs, and most recently digital downloads - yet tens of thousands are still made each week. Travis Elborough takes comfort in new signs of life for his beloved shiny black discs

When the Voyager probes were launched on their missions to Jupiter and Saturn in 1977 - incidentally the centenary year of Edison's phonograph - they went carrying a special cargo. Inside each craft was a 12-inch copper-plated gold disc and a basic self-assembly record player.

The discs contained (along with some analogue encoded images) a set of recordings intended to convey a sense of life on this planet. Accordingly, salutations in Wu dialect and initiation songs from Zairian Pygmy girls joined Chuck Berry's "Johnny B Goode" and Glenn Gould playing a fugue from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, on a kind of mixtape Earth. Carl Sagan, who compiled it, said at the time: "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilisations in interstellar space."

Like the steam-powered rockets in the speculative fictions of Jules Verne and HG Wells, the scheme of blasting an LP into space seems archaic now. And the idea that only "advanced space-faring civilisations" could tackle something as simple as a record appears rather arrogant. We can picture a dome-headed creature in some distant galaxy muttering "How very primitive" and casting the 12-inch aside.

The Voyager ships, originally planned to last five years, continue to beam signals back to Earth, but even more surprising is that 12in long-playing records are still with us. Vinyl, for years a dead man walking in the aftermath of the cassette Walkman, the CD, downloading and the iPod, is currently enjoying a resurgence of sorts. In October 2007, Amazon.com began selling vinyl albums and a range of players. The Hayes pressing plant, immortalised on the Beatles' Parlophone sleeves but mothballed by EMI in 2000, now turns out 20,000 records a week. A far cry from the 250,000 a day it produced in the early 1970s, but not bad for a format supposedly consigned to the dustbin by its digital successors.

Why the "revival"? It's partly the loyalty of crate-digging DJs, and the tendency of people of a certain age and with enough disposable income to fetishise arcane objects they associate with their youth, but it's also that the sound files so easily found online seem disposable. Teenagers today want to possess tangible and - in the case of limited-edition 7in singles - collectable symbols of ersatz tribal loyalty that, for the moment, at least, are deemed unimpeachably "cool".

Fashion is fickle, and oil supplies for vinyl are finite. Burning desires for 180g "cut from the original masters" mono-collector pressings of classic albums could quickly be extinguished by a rise or two in interest rates. And to a new generation of youngsters used to the instant availability of everything on the internet, the thought of purchasing any music - let alone on damageable chunks of plastic that you can't fast-forward - will appear quaint, if not perversely anachronistic. Typing these words, WiFied to the web, I can't help feeling ever so slightly mocked for spending so much of my own life scouring bargain bins and tramping from record shop to record shop. Practically the whole musical canon is only a mouse-click away, and a good deal of it is completely free.

Those of us who experienced adolescence in old space, and grew up revering the concept of the LP (on occasions, the concept LP), must concede that these days we are far more likely to hear our albums (fresh purchases and ancient favourites) in bits and on the hoof. And often slightly distractedly while doing something else. We are rarely without distractions - even from listening to music, which was once regarded as a distraction in itself.

It is getting on for a decade since MP3s started to crack open the notion of the album as a linear, unalterable whole. Programming functions on CD players had already started this ball rolling, or picked up where 8-track cartridges and homemade compilations on cassettes had left off. But with free-floating digital files, the listener was finally liberated from the physical constraints of the album as an object. The ability to store thousands of different songs on our computers, MP3 players and phones has irrevocably altered how we think about, acquire and enjoy music - much as the LP did when it arrived in 1948. The independent record label Matador is not alone in supplying a coupon for the corresponding download with every new 180g LP it sells. Contemporary vinyl junkies want the artefact but, it would appear, are no longer able fully to countenance the restrictions of the form.

Hardly surprising when there is an overwhelming tendency, encouraged by per-song pricing on iTunes, for albums to be consumed in the manner of small children nibbling away at sandwiches and leaving the crusts. Instead of being gobbled up/suffered in their entirety, they can be snacked on and filleted for a handful of the most popular songs.

Our current listening habits are becoming closer to the pre-vinyl era, when people collected individual tunes and did much of their listening via the radio, spinning from station to station until they found something to their taste. The earliest albums were, after all, merely sets of shellac 78s, stored like photographs in binders - the term was first applied to a four-disc package of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite in 1909. The phrase rather nicely conveys that they were keepsakes that you might cherish. With 78s, it was all too easy to love them to death. Made of a resin secreted by insects combined with carbon black and limestone to produce a heavy, brittle pancake, they wore out after around 70 to 100 plays. Lasting just over four minutes a side, they also shattered if dropped.

Developed by a team at Columbia Records under the leadership of Peter Goldmark, and following the successful use of polyvinyl in the production of records for American troops during the second world war, the LP revolutionised the record industry. Almost immediately, it spurred Columbia's main competitor, RCA, to launch a rival vinyl platter - the 7in 45rpm - triggering a format war known as the "battle of the speeds", which in retrospect resembles the clash between Betamax and VHS video in the 1980s. In this instance, both survived. The 7in in effect replaced the 78 and became the preferred medium for popular songs and the fodder for jukeboxes.

In the adult and classical market, the advantages of the LP over the 78 (and to an extent the 45) had been vividly rammed home at its launch in the Waldorf Astoria hotel on June 20 1948. Before a disc was played, journalists were greeted by the sight of Columbia's president Edward Wallerstein flanked by stacks of 78s and new LPs. Whereas the 78s teetered some 8ft high, the LPs, reputedly containing the same amount of music, stood at a mere 15in.

With a virtually crackle-free playing length of over 22 minutes a side, the infinitely more durable LP allowed symphonic movements, operas, stage plays and musicals (the cast recording of South Pacific was an early hit) to be savoured at leisure in convincing wholes. Or at least in compelling acts.

The improvements in listening time and sound quality - assisted by the almost simultaneous arrival of magnetic tape for recording - were to feed an unexpected boom in sales of mood-enhancing background music. Annunzio Mantovani might have been derided, even at the height of his fame in the early 1960s, for peddling aural sleeping pills, but he was still the first person to sell a million stereo LPs.

In the classical field, vinyl helped to usher many dormant pieces into the fold, not least Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Only recorded in full by Louis Kaufman in 1948, this former file-under-Bach footnote of the baroque era rose exponentially in status on LP - both the sonorous quality of its orchestration and its theme, a yearly cycle, could readily be discerned on crystal-clear vinyl. A decade later, John Culshaw, with Georg Solti, began recording Wagner's Ring in its entirety for Decca, a seven-year project that was pretty much impossible before the LP. By Culshaw's own estimation, 112 shellac 78s would have been needed to house the 14-hour cycle that they eventually accommodated on just 19 LPs.

The musicologist Timothy Day has maintained that in the first 10 years of the long-player alone, "a greater range of musical repertoire was brought into the home than in the entire history of recording in its first century". The LP undoubtedly put more music, more easily and more affordably before the public than ever before. Economies of scale meant customers were able to pick up albums in the new supermarkets or order by post lightweight "unbreakable" LPs from specialist dealers, small DIY labels or bargain record clubs.

The "sleeve", created by Columbia art director Alex Steinweiss when it was discovered that the paper wrapping used for 78s marked vinyl, proved to be as important an innovation as the record itself. A canvas that later allowed Pink Floyd to unleash an inflatable pig on London and the Sex Pistols to cause outrage with a ripe, eight-letter Anglo-Saxon word, it presented the consumer with an attractive and informative package. Sleeve notes provided a chance for performers to speak to their fans directly, and for autodidactics to learn while listening.

The LP, though, in changing the ways in which music was recorded, heard and consumed, left some feeling uneasy. Writing in High Fidelity magazine on its 10th birthday, the critic Roland Gellatt argued that the world was in danger of being "dulled by a glut of cheap merchandise"; not only had record buying become "a far more casual affair" than in pre-LP days, but records themselves were no longer listened to with "devotion and absorption". Cognitive senses once kept at the peak of agility by the need to switch discs at unlikely intervals on 78s were, he felt, getting flabby in the era of on-tap LPs.

Like Gellatt, I suppose I find myself perturbed by the casualness with which a record collection that would have taken a lifetime to accrue can be stored on something little bigger than a cigarette packet and accessed at the flick of a dial. I remain wedded by habit, age and stubbornness to vinyl. The rituals of the LP, involving sleeves, sides played, needles, fluff and cloths, which were only enhanced by the scents of the record (rather waxy) and the cover (woodlouse dampish) that mingled like incense, are hard to forget. And perhaps, rather like a religious upbringing, however irrational to one's later self, harder still to shake off. After 60 years, there's enough out there to keep me spinning for a good while yet.

· Travis Elborough's The Long-Player Goodbye is published by Sceptre on July 10.